Watching the current trends and future direction of Oracle's Applications

Monday, July 21, 2008

PSOUG

So I did spend Thursday hanging with the folks at PSOUG for the first day of "Oracle Days". My take is that PSOUG is driving the beginning of something special. They're beginning to build up some traction with the Oracle user community in the Pacific Northwest. While I'm primarily an apps and apps technology guy, and Oracle Days seemed to draw more of a database and developer crowd, even I could see the momentum building. The Pacific Northwest is more than a little geographically isolated from an Oracle community perspective - it's good to see a regional community coming together. If you missed Oracle Days this year, be sure to make it next time...there's good stuff coming together.

On a more personal note, Seattle is a beautiful city. This was my first trip there, but I'm thinking I may go back for a few days later this summer. If I do, however, it's a pretty safe bet I won't fly Alaska Airlines again. This trip was my first with Alaska. On the return, I got lazy and checked my brand-new American Tourister bag - bad move. You can see what Alaska did to my bag here, here, and here. Some of the contents were also damaged - pics here and here. Still waiting to hear from Alaska about any type of consideration for the damage.

One last note on the flying experience. For some reason, any bag I check been searched on every trip I've taken since 9/11. Funny how I'm cleared to work on NASA projects, but I seems to be on some type of hot list with the TSA...think I may pack some of those paper pop-up snakes in my bag for my flight to OpenWorld this year, just to see what happens ;)